We've all known people who believe themselves to be experts in the art of seduction. They're usually male, and into wearing a lot of hair gel and leaving their collars turned up. Sometimes they will have seen the film Swingers, and believe themselves to be incredibly amusing by calling women 'babies' a lot.

If they are female, they tend to dress like film stars on a very tight budget and wear a lot of red lipstick which smears stickily, and faintly nauseatingly, around the tops of glasses. These women will flash their eyes at men like traffic warnings in driving rain, but they will never accept that they might be too obvious. ('With men, you can never be too obvious.')

Male or female, people who truly believe themselves to be seductive are rarely able to enter any kind of public gathering without trying to 'captivate' at least one person. You can tell that they have arrived by the way they enter the room, bristling with purpose, scanning it for likely prey. You can actually see their minds working: one person falling under their spell would be good, but the whole room would be better.

Are these people trying too hard? Well, yes and no. The trick is to be seductive without taking it all so seriously that everyone laughs every time you open your mouth. And we can all do it. After all, we have all been 'seductive' in our time. Most of us have witnesses to those rare moments in our past when we could conceivably pass as 'irresistible'. Some of these witnesses were even sober at the time. Some of the time you were as well.

Why is it, then, that once ensconced in a stable relationship, most people's seductiveness seems to wane until the most tempting thing they do for their partner is offer a cup of tea without a resentful snarl? Certainly, where relationships are concerned, there lies the real art of seduction. After all, if trying too hard is so bad, what about trying too little?